The National Institutes of Health (NIH) NITAAC has been busy over the past month with three amendments to the CIO-SP4. Amendments 12, 13, and 14 primarily revise submission dates and make changes to the reporting of past experience examples. Below is a summary of the pertinent details from these amendments, as we know this is an important procurement for many contractors.
Amendment 12, released December 16, 2021, requests proposal revisions from offerors who provided proposals by August 27, 2021. Proposals may be revised to reflect the changes in sections L.5.2.1 through L.5.2.4. However, no new proposals are being accepted. Amendment 12 limits the number of experience examples required by both the mentor and protégé in a mentor protégé agreement. Mentors may submit two experience examples of leading edge technology, two examples of federal multiple award experience, and two examples of Executive Order 13779 work. Protégés are only required to submit one experience example from one of the following categories: corporate experience, leading edge technology, federal multiple award, or Executive Order 13779 work. Executive Order 13779 work includes Information Technology projects that directly supported Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). The Amendment stated proposal revisions were due January 21, 2022, but do not despair if this applies to you and you have not submitted revisions by January 21. Amendment 14 addresses the proposal date and pushes it back.
We wrote about why NITAAC made this change in response to a protest decision in our post here.
Amendment 13, released January 12, 2022, requires all offerors, regardless of whether they made revisions to their proposals per Amendment 12, to resubmit their proposals by January 21, 2022. Again, new proposals are not being accepted. Offerors must have previously submitted their initial proposal by August 27, 2021, to be eligible. The self-scoring sheet previously found in attachment J.5 has been removed and information on iNsight, the new method of calculating Self Scores, has been added. Further, the format of submissions has been updated, with notable changes requiring all documents to be in a searchable format and each individual file limited to 20MB.
Amendment 14, released January 14, 2022, pushes the re-submission date back a week to January 28, 2022, updates the file naming conventions, and updates and clarifies requirements of submitting a J.6 for each experience example submitted. If an experience example is submitted due to changes imposed by Amendment 12, a new and executed Self-Scoring Sheet Experience Template J.6 is also required. Experience examples that were originally submitted and are not changing do not require new J.6 forms. All J.6 forms submitted by entities that advance to phase 2 of the selection process will require, within one week of advancing, the signature of the “contracting officer or private sector equivalent responsible for contractually binding their organization” or a Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) record of the contract action.
Overall, these changes are fairly minor. But as contractors know, if they don’t pay close attention to the changes in formatting, how proposals are submitted, and other changes, it could cost them an award.
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